Dirty Harry 11 - Death in the Air (20 page)

When she looked up, Harry had already gone. She heard his voice coming from the lab.

“Run,” he said. “Run and keep running. And pray you never have reason to see me again.”

Harry turned on all the gas jets in the laboratory. He ran over to Carr’s corpse and injected it with the pistol syringe. He ran down the stairs and into the kitchen. Denise Patterson was already gone.

He turned on all the ovens and stoves there, after blowing out the pilot lights. He ripped open two bags of flour and turned on the overhead fans. He grabbed the tops of two more cloth sacks of flour and dragged them into the cellar.

Dragging them over to the air-conditioning system, he turned it all the way up and dumped all one hundred pounds of the white powdery stuff inside.

Shaking, his entire body stinging from the reopened wounds and the armor of sweat, Callahan dragged himself outside. He ran, fell, rolled, and crawled on his hands and knees to the front gate.

He pulled himself upright on the chain-link fence and pulled out the Magnum. The shot he used to break the lock nearly knocked him over. He threw the gates wide and staggered across the street, tripping on the curb.

Harry climbed up onto the brick wall of the slum there, his breath coming in tortured, jabbing gulps. He spun around to face the Program building. He leaned back against the bricks, his feet wide.

The gun came up in both hands, but his eyes wouldn’t focus. A rainbow-streaked haze drifted across his vision. In it, the building seemed to waver and come alive. It was breathing. It was ripping itself out of its foundation.

Callahan shouted his rage, the sound a bestial cry in the condemned neighborhood. The barrel stopped, centered between two metal slats. The cannon boomed.

The bullet went through the glass and slashed across the very top of the metal slat. The friction made a single spark.

The spark ignited the highly volatile flour which the overhead fans and air conditioning had spread into a fine powder throughout the building. The flour detonated the gas. The gas engulfed everything else.

The kitchen exploded out. The lab exploded up. Everything was engulfed in a ball of orange flame which broiled the entire interior at once.

Harry was slammed into unconsciousness by the conflagration. He didn’t see the roofless building collapse upon itself, its debris burnt up before it hit the ground.

All he saw was a charred, half-story ruin when he woke up, hours later. He felt his face. His eyelashes and brows were crumbling ash.

But gone, too, were the terror and confusion. They had been purged by the fireball, as surely as the Cellulene had been dissolved.

Harry stood. It still wasn’t easy, but it was worth it. Beyond the destroyed building, the sun had come up.

It was January one, the first day of the New Year.

The year 1984.

D
ANE
H
ARTMAN
was a Warner Books imprint pseudonym used by two American novelists, Ric Meyers and Leslie Alan Horvitz. "Hartman" was credited as the author of the Dirty Harry action series based on the “Dirty” Harry Callahan character of the popular 1970’s and 1980’s films starring Clint Eastwood.

Following the release of the third Dirty Harry movie, The Enforcer, in 1976, Clint Eastwood made it clear that he did not intend to make any more Dirty Harry movies. In 1981, Warner Books (the publishing arm of Warner Bros., which made the films) began publishing a number of men’s adventure series under its now-defunct "Men of Action" line. One such series features the further adventures of Inspector Harry Callahan. The series was brought to an end when Eastwood decided to direct, produce, and star in a fourth Dirty Harry movie, Sudden Impact, which was released in December 1983.